On Techno and Electronic Music

June 2008:

While popular in Europe for nearly 30 years, electronic music never had the same mainstream appeal or critical appreciation in the US. Having recently returned from Berlin, arguably the electronic (and certainly techno) music capital of the world, sparked some thoughts on this dichotomy.

Rock and Roll, that most American of music genres, would be unthinkable without the influence of Jazz and, more generally, the music of African Americans. Yet the strain of folk music and its European underpinnings has never been shaken. The beat and texture of Africa was transposed on the melody and rationality of Europe. Despite the energy of rock, and much pop, it remains a melody focused endeavour, one that values the 'human' qualities of music, whatever they may be.

Americans in particular have valued the 'natural' sound of the guitar and the 'skill' of the traditional musician. To many in the States, respect is lauded on the artisan craftsmanship of one who physically plays an instrument. The same attitude can also be found in the American approach to visual art - hence why among the general population Thomas Kinkead is valued above, say, Marcel Duchamp. This recalls the classic Clement Greenberg commentary on kitsch. It is this worship of the 'human' and 'craftsman' that leads to the American, and to a lesser extent global, distrust and misunderstanding of electronic music. It is electronic music, however, that is the perhaps the most human, and certainly the most reflective on our culture today. It can even be expressive.

With the rise of Modernism and its deification of technology and mechanisation came a contrasting desire to embrace the natural, the 'human'. This was certainly a backward looking approach, but was an elixir that tamed the raw brutality and onward march of Modernism's factory approach to life. By the late 19th and early 20th century, however, the genius of man was put on a pedestal, faith in technology and progress surpassing that of God.

Two world wars later, faith in science and technology as our saviour dissipated, but reproduction would not cease. Mass affluence led to a rabid consumer culture that depended upon media and simulacra in addition to the traditional ingredients of science and technology. The latter may not have been able to save us, but the former made this irrelevant. And so our view of the world evolved, the postmodern was born

In the nascent condition of the postmodern the context of technology has changed, but humanity continues to move forward as self-crowned masters of the universe. Technology and mechanisation remain our (illusory) hope for the future. This is the very tradition of humankind's biological domination of the world. We may not posses the sheer force of a lion, but our intellectual capacity has allowed us to innovate ourselves out of dire situations and into comfort. If we celebrate this 'genius' of humankind in our economy, our media, even our visual art, why hasn't this been fully accepted with music?

The roots of electronic music can be difficult to pinpoint. Early pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Walter/Wendy Carlos conducted experiments in this medium. Classically trained musicians with a penchant for the avant-garde, their work was a corollary to the experiments in visual art and literature, a chronicle of the death of modernism and rise of postmodernism. If the synthesiser was a quintessentially Modern creation, its application to mass-produced music was certainly a postmodern one.

It was the Germans who brought pop sensibilities to electronic music in the 1970s - Kraftwerk, Neu!, Tangerine Dream. While also classically trained, the disposable fun of pop music was integrated into the avant-garde character of electronic music. It was as if Andy Warhol mated with Beethoven and Immanuel Kant on the altar of the computer. These new musicians were not afraid to experiment, but a sense of irony , repetition, and the visual - the very condition of the postmodern - infected their works. The very chaos of contemporary society was embraced by not only the work itself, but the medium it was crafted in. Why try and create a sound pre-machine when you could embrace the newest sonic technology and all it offers? And so the evolution began, from Krautrock to ambient, from disco to synthpop, from funk to hip-hop, from house to techno. The Diaspora of electronic music entered every crevice of our (popular) sonic landscape.

Many producers and musicians, particularly in the traditional 'pop' genre, attempted to 'naturalise' the sound of the machine, however. Lush canorous soundscapes were created with the latest in digital technolog and humanity's odd need to go back to familiar sounds and feelings of the past continued. Against this background of false realities were those who embraced all electronic music had to offer – pure synthetic rhythm and texture repeated to the beat of contemporary society.

While many genres embraced this attitude, no genre is perhaps more representative of it as techno today. The pure primitive beat of ancient cultures transposed on our most sophisticated machines is perhaps the most ‘human’ music being made today. This isn’t to say that all of it is necessarily good, but that the mainstream veneration of rock, country, pop, and jazz is not a faithful representation of what is human today, but are rather continuations of past human conditions.

Nothing is more human than the harnessing of technology to further our wants and needs and music is no exception to this. Using machines to flesh-out our mind’s desire is the culmination of what so much of our culture values. Why go through the painful manual processes of the past when the mind can create machines that liberate?

The seeming ease of technological instruments to create music creates our disrespect for it. Surely anyone can do it? It is this ease that creates the need for an even more creative mind to compose sounds and textures that push boundaries. Producers today endlessly tweak and massage sounds to achieve something so sublimely mysterious and alien, yet strangely captivating. The sound of the machine integrated with the most biological of beats – the heart. The heartbeat is, I think, the most human and primitive source of music. It is literally what makes us tick. As humanity and technology slowly converge, the sonic recreation of the heartbeat rhythm by synthetic means is the truest form of humanity. It moves us (literally) and we focus on the purest of sounds.

Mechanisation is human – it is what we produce that makes us most different from other species on this planet. The externalities of this process are not always positive and the merits debatable, but to deny the humanity of technology is folly. So let us put an end to these spurious claims that techno specifically, and electronic music more generally, is antiseptic music that has no real substance. Walk into a club in Berlin and listen to that most Teutonic celebration of efficiency and technology. Techno is humanity in its latest sonic incarnation - a product of its socio-political economy.